WikiLeaks volunteer was a paid informant for the FBI

On an August workday in 2011, a cherubic 18-year-old
Icelandic man named Sigurdur "Siggi" Thordarson walked through the
stately doors of the US embassy in Reykjavík, his jacket pocket
concealing his calling card: a crumpled photocopy of an Australian
passport. The passport photo showed a man with a unruly shock of
platinum blonde hair and the name Julian Paul Assange.

Thordarson was a long-time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct
access to Assange and a key position as an organiser in the group.
With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else:
the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three
months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the
secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to
the US government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000
(£3,280). The FBI flew him internationally four times for
debriefings, including one trip to Washington DC, and on the last
meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat
logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks.

The relationship provides a rare window into the US law
enforcement investigation into WikiLeaks, the transparency group
newly thrust back into international prominence with its assistance to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Thordarson's
double-life illustrates the lengths to which the government was
willing to go in its pursuit of Julian Assange, approaching
WikiLeaks with the tactics honed during the FBI's work against
organised crime and computer hacking -- or, more darkly, the
bureau's Hoover-era infiltration of civil rights
groups.

"It's a sign that the FBI views WikiLeaks as a suspected
criminal organisation rather than a news organisation," says
Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Project
on Government Secrecy. "WikiLeaks was something new, so I think the
FBI had to make a choice at some point as to how to evaluate it: Is
this the New York Times, or is this something else? And
they clearly decided it was something else."

The FBI declined comment.

Thordarson was 17 years old and still in high school when he
joined WikiLeaks in February 2010. He was one of a large contingent
of Icelandic volunteers that flocked to Assange's cause after
WikiLeaks published internal bank documents pertaining to that
country's financial crisis.

"I will defend you against all accusations and
stick by you, as I have done"

Julian Assange

When a staff
revolt in September 2010 left the organisation short-handed,
Assange put Thordarson in charge of the WikiLeaks chat room, making
Thordarson the first point of contact for new volunteers,
journalists, potential sources, and outside groups clamouring to
get in with WikiLeaks at the peak of its notoriety.

In that role, Thordarson was a middle man in the negotiations
with the Bradley Manning Defense Fund that led to WikiLeaks
donating $15,000 (£9,800) to the defense of its prime source. He
greeted and handled a new volunteer who had begun downloading and
organising a vast trove of 70s-era diplomatic cables from the
National Archives and Record Administration, for what became
WikiLeaks' "Kissinger cables" collection last April. And he
wrangled scores of volunteers and supporters who did everything
from redesign WikiLeaks' websites to shooting video homages to
Assange.

He accumulated thousands of pages of chat logs from his time in
WikiLeaks, which, he says, are now in the hands of the FBI.

Thordarson's betrayal of WikiLeaks was also a personal
betrayal of its founder, Julian Assange, who, former colleagues
say, took Thordarson under his wing, and kept him around in the
face of criticism and legal controversy.

"When Julian met him for the first or second time, I was there,"
says Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Icelandic Parliament who
worked with WikiLeaks on Collateral Murder, the Wikileaks release
of footage of a US helicopter attack in Iraq. "And I warned Julian
from day one, there's something not right about this guy... I asked
not to have him as part of the Collateral Murder team."

In January 2011, Thordarson was implicated in a bizarre
political scandal in which a mysterious "spy computer" laptop was
found running unattended in an empty office in the parliament
building. "If you did [it], don't tell me," Assange told
Thordarson, according to unauthenticated chat logs provided by
Thordarson.

"I will defend you against all accusations, ring [sic] and
wrong, and stick by you, as I have done," Assange told him in
another chat the next month. "But I expect total loyalty in
return."

Instead, Thordarson used his proximity to Assange for his own
purposes. The most consequential act came in June 2011, on his
third visit to Ellingham Hall -- the English mansion where Assange
was then under house arrest while fighting extradition to
Sweden.

For reasons that remain murky, Thordarson decided to approach
members of the Lulzsec hacking gang and solicit them to hack
Icelandic government systems as a service to WikiLeaks. To
establish his bona fides as a WikiLeaks representative, he shot and
uploaded a 40-second smartphone video that opens on the IRC screen
with the chat in progress, and then floats across the room to
capture Asssange at work with an associate. (This exchange was
first reported by Parmy Olson in her book on Anonymous.)

LulzKevin Poulsen

Unfortunately for Thordarson, the FBI had busted Lulzsec's
leader, Hector Xavier Monsegur, AKA Sabu, a week earlier, and
secured his cooperation as an informant. On June 20, the FBI warned
the Icelandic government. "A huge team of FBI came to Iceland and
asked the Icelandic authorities to help them," says Jonsdottir.
"They thought there was an imminent Lulzsec attack on Iceland."

The FBI may not have known at this point who Thordarson was
beyond his screen names. The bureau and law enforcement agencies in
the UK and Australia went on to round up alleged Lulzsec members on
unrelated charges.

Having dodged that bullet, it's not clear what prompted
Thordarson to approach the FBI two months later. When I asked him
directly last week, he answered, "I guess I cooperated because I
didn't want to participate in having Anonymous and Lulzsec hack for
Wikileaks, since then you're definitely breaking quite a lot of
laws."

That answer doesn't make a lot of sense, since it was
Thordarson, not Assange, who asked Lulzsec to hack Iceland. There's
no evidence of any other WikiLeaks staffer being involved. He
offered a second reason that he admits is more truthful: "The
second reason was the adventure."

Thordarson's equivocation highlights a hurdle in reporting on
him: He is prone to lying. Jonsdottir calls him "pathological". He
admits he has lied to me in the past. For this story, Thordarson
backed his account by providing emails that appear to be between
him and his FBI handlers, flight records for some of his travels,
and an FBI receipt indicating that he gave them eight hard drives.
The Icelandic Ministry of the Interior has previously confirmed
that the FBI flew to Iceland to interview Thordarson. Thordarson
also testified to much of this account in a session of the
Icelandic Parliament, with Jonsdottir in attendance.

Finally, he has given me a substantial subset of the chat logs
he says he passed to the FBI, amounting to about 2,000 pages,
which, at the very least, proves that he kept logs and is willing
to turn them over to a reporter disliked by Julian Assange.

Thordarson's "adventure" began on August 23, 2011, when he sent
an email to the general delivery box for the US embassy in
Reykjavík "Regarding an Ongoing Criminal investigation in the
United States".

"The nature of the intel that can be brought to light in that
investigation will not be spoken over email conversation," he wrote
cryptically.

An embassy security officer called him the same day. "He said,
'What investigation?' I said the Wikileaks," says
Thordarson. "He denied there was such an investigation, so I just
said we both know there is."

Thordarson was invited to the embassy, where he presented a copy
of Assange's passport, the passport for Assange's number two,
Kristinn Hrafnsson, and a snippet of a private chat between
Thordarson and Assange. The embassy official was noncommittal. He
told Thordarson they might be in touch, but it would take at least
a week.

It happened much faster.

Sigurdur Thordarson

FBI agents and two federal prosecutors landed in a private
Gulfstream on the next day, on 24 August, and Thordarson was
summoned back to the embassy.

He was met by the same embassy official who took his keys and
his smartphone, then walked with him on a circuitous route through
the streets of downtown Reykjavík, ending up at the Hotel Reykjavik
Centrum, Thordarson says. There, Thordarson spent two hours in a
hotel conference room talking to two FBI agents. Then they
accompanied him back to the embassy so he could put money in his
parking meter, and back to the hotel for more
debriefing.

The agents asked him about his Lulzsec interactions, but were
primarily interested in what he could give them on WikiLeaks. One
of them asked him if he could wear a recording device on his next
visit to London and get Assange to say something incriminating, or
talk about Bradley Manning.

"They asked what I use daily, have always on," he says. "I said,
my watch. So they said they could change that out for some
recording watch."

Thordarson says he declined. "I like Assange, even considered
him a friend," he says. "I just didn't want to go that way."

In all, Thordarson spent 20 hours with the agents over about
five days. Then the Icelandic government ordered the FBI to pack up
and go home.

It turns out the FBI had misled the local authorities about its
purpose in the country. According to a timeline (.pdf) later released by the National Commissioner of
the Icelandic Police, the FBI contacted Icelandic law enforcement
to report Thordarson's embassy walk-in, and ask for permission to
fly into the country to follow up. But the bureau had presented the
request as an extension of its earlier investigation into Lulzsec,
and failed to mention that its real target was
WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks is well regarded in Iceland, and the incident errupted
into a hot political topic when it surfaced there this year, with
conservatives arguing that Iceland should have cooperated with the
FBI, and liberals complaining about the agents being allowed into
the country to begin with. "It became a massive controversy," says
Jonsdottir. "And then none of them knew what sort of person Siggi
is."

Politics aside, the FBI was not done with Thordarson.

The agents persuaded Thordarson to fly to Copenhagen with them,
he says, for another day of interviews. In October, he made a
second trip to Denmark for another debriefing. Between meetings,
Thordarson kept in touch with his handlers through disposable email
accounts.

In November 2011, Thordarson was fired from WikiLeaks. The
organisation had discovered he had set up an online WikiLeaks
T-shirt store and arranged for the proceeds to go into his own bank
account. WikiLeaks has
said the embezzlement amounted to about $50,000 (£33,000).

Thordarson told the FBI about it in a terse email on 8 November.
"No longer with WikiLeaks -- so not sure how I can help you
more".

"We'd still like to talk with you in person," one of his
handlers replied. "I can think of a couple of easy ways for you to
help."

"Can you guys help me with cash?" Thordarson shot back.

For the next few months, Thordarson begged the FBI for money,
while the FBI alternately ignored him and courted him for more
assistance. In the end, Thordarson says, the FBI agreed to
compensate him for the work he missed while meeting with agents (he
says he worked at a bodyguard-training school), totaling about
$5,000 (£3,280).

With the money settled, the FBI began preparing him for a trip
to the US. "I wanted to talk to you about future things we can do,"
his handler wrote in February. The FBI wanted him to reestablish
contact with some of his former WikiLeaks associates. "We'll talk
about specific goals of the chats, but you can get a head start
before our meet by just getting in touch and catching up with them.
If you need to know who specifically, we can discuss on the
phone."

Sigurdur Thordarson

The three-day DC trip took place in February of last year.
Thordarson says he flew on Iceland Air flight 631 to Logan
International Airport on 22 February, and transferred in Boston to
JetBlue flight 686 to Dulles International Aiport, where he was
greeted by a US Customs official "and then escorted out the Dulles
terminal into the arms of the FBI".

He stayed at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, where the Justice
Department's investigation into WikiLeaks is centred, and met there
with his two usual FBI contacts, and three or four other men in
suits who did not identify themselves.

"At the last day we went to a steak house and ate, all of us,"
he says. "Where they served Coca Cola in glass bottles from
Mexico."

On March 18, 2012, he had one more meeting with the FBI in
Denmark. On this trip, he brought along eight of his personal hard
drives, containing the information he'd compiled while at
WikiLeaks, including his chat logs, photos and videos he shot at
Ellington Hall. The FBI gave him a signed receipt for the
hardware.

Then they cut him off.

Today, Thordarson, now 20, has new problems. He's facing
criminal charges in Iceland for unrelated financial and tax crimes.
In addition, WikiLeaks filed a police report for the T-shirt shop
embezzlement.

The legacy of his cooperation with the FBI is unclear. A court
filing revealed last week shows that in the months following
Thordarson's last debriefing, Justice Department officials in
Arlington, Virginia, began obtaining court orders targeting two of
Thordarson's former WikiLeaks colleagues in Iceland: Smari McCarthy
and Herbert Snorrason.

Snorrason, who ran the WikiLeaks chat room in 2010, before
Thordarson took it over, had the entire contents
of his Gmail account handed over to the government, under a
secret search warrant issued in October 2011.

The evidence used to obtain the warrant remains under
seal. "I do wonder," says Thordarson, "whether I'm somewhere in
there."